What One Person Can Do

I was intending this week to write about Tuesday’s presidential debate, but then I had the idea to write in a different vein entirely. I actually do have a lot to say about the debate and what its general tenor says about the state of our nation. But as we make our way through these days between Yom Kippur and Sukkot—which is to say between the day on which we own up freely and prayerfully to our own ethical shortcomings and the festival devoted to the formal acknowledgement of the fragility of the human condition and its ephemeral nature—in the course of these specific days, it struck me as a far better use of this space to invite you all to join me in looking at a specific individual, no less brittle and human than the rest of us, who nonetheless had it in him to live up to the image in God in which all are created. Why look down when we can look up?

Some of you may have noticed the story in the paper the other day about a thirteen-year-old Nigerian boy named Omar Farouk who lives in the northwestern Nigerian state of Kano and who had the misfortune to be overheard when, in the context of an argument with a friend, apparently spoke disrespectfully about God. Someone overheard him and made a report to the police, after which the boy was arrested, tried in a Muslim court of Sharia law, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years at menial labor in a local jail. (Nigerian law apparently countenances the existence of this parallel legal system and permits it actually to execute people convicted of capital offenses.) Nor can anyone accuse the Islamic court of being inconsistent: that same day that young Omar was sentenced, the court also sentenced a young musician of twenty-two named Yahaya Sharif-Aminu to death for having committed the same crime. So they must have considered that they were letting the boy off easy by only putting him in prison for the next decade of his life. And all this despite the fact that the Nigerian Constitution guarantees citizens freedom of expression and freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

I also noticed the story.  And then, pausing only long enough to be amazed that I, who have read so much about the Shoah and other instances of genocide, can still be surprised how harsh and cruel people can be, I turned the page and went back to reading about the dozen other disasters reported on that day and allowed the boy’s fate to fade quickly into the background. And I say that as someone who abhors the concept of blasphemy and who tries (mostly successfully) to avoid taking God’s name in vain. On the other hand, lots was going on. California was on fire. The Breanna Taylor grand jury decision had just been released. COVID numbers in New York were (and are) slowly rising. So a boy I never heard of living in a place I also never heard of was treated harshly in a way that no child should ever encounter. What was I going to do about that?

So that’s the difference between people who talk the talk and people like Piotr Cywinski who walk the walk. You’ve probably never heard of him. I also hadn’t, but I probably should have since he is the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and so a man charged with the preservation of the physical remains of a place of such unparalleled horror that even those words themselves seem inadequate. (For more about Piotr Cywinski, click here. For more about the museum he heads, click here.)

Like myself, Cywinski also read in the paper about Omar Farouk’s trial, conviction, and sentencing. And also like myself, Cywinski has no specific connection—or any connection—to Nigeria at all, let alone to the trial of one specific child in Kano State, a place to which he obviously also has no connection. It is true that Cywinski welcomed the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, to the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum in 2018, at which time the Buhari toured the site and spoke movingly about the experience. (For the official Nigerian government press release regarding President Buhari’s visit, click here.) But other than that one single meeting, there was no ongoing connection between the two. And yet Cywinski saw in their chance encounter a crack in the harsh escutcheon of a mostly uncaring world and the concomitant opportunity to shine some light through it into the darkness.

And so he sat down and wrote a letter to the President of Nigeria, a man whose visit to Auschwitz lasted, so the press release mentioned above, precisely one hour and ten minutes. And in that letter he asked the President to intercede on the lad’s behalf, writing as follows, “As the director of the Auschwitz Memorial, that commemorates the victims and preserves the remains of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where children were imprisoned and murdered, I cannot remain indifferent to this disgraceful sentence for humanity. Regardless of what [Omar] said, he cannot be treated as fully aware and responsible, given his age. He should not be subjected to the loss of the entirety of his youth, be deprived of opportunities, and stigmatized physically, emotionally, and educationally for the rest of his life.”

So far, so good. But then he made an exceptional offer: as the master of a place in which countless children were murdered, he offered personally to go to Nigeria for the sake of a single child and serve a month of the boy’s sentence…and, at the same, time, to sign up another 119 adults from around the world to do the same thing so that the child’s 120-month sentence would be served by adults far more able to withstand the deprivations and menial labor of prison life than any child could or should.  Who these other 119 people are, Cywinski hasn’t said. Just that they exist and that there were far more than just 119 people ready to sign up and travel to Nigeria if the President would permit this actually to happen.

This would not be a popular decision for the Nigerian President to make. A mob of angry citizens took matters into its own hands the other day and burnt Yahaya Sharif’s home to the ground. Young Omar’s own mother had to flee from a similar mob intent on punishing her for having raised a blasphemer. Mobs in Nigeria have also killed individuals merely accused of blasphemy without waiting for anything as time-consuming as an actual trial.

And yet…whatever President Buhari’s decision finally is, the notion that the director of the Auschwitz memorial would offer to leave his home, his family, his workplace, and his nation voluntarily to accept incarceration in a Nigerian prison to spare a child he hasn’t ever met and of whom he only heard the other week when his sentence was announced—that is precisely the kind of gesture that gives true meaning to the old rabbinic notions that there are people who can acquire a portion in the World to Come with a single gesture…and that the possibility of bringing healing and repair to the world is not solely in the hands of saints and heroes, but also in the hands of ordinary people possessed of eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that cannot bear harshness and cruelty at all…and particularly, perhaps, when directed towards a child. Piotr Cywinski’s gesture is an illustration of just how profound a lesson a teacher possessed of the courage to do good in the world can teach merely by leading by example. Yesh adam she-koneh et olamo b’shaah achat. There are those who struggle for years and years to justify their place on earth…and others who do precisely that in as long as it takes to write a letter and make it public.